A large class of prior work has considered different forms of agent commitments. [1]} proposes the contract net protocol, which allocates tasks among agents and commits them to complete a particular task. [2]} is a recent study in this line of work. The paper considers multi-agent zero-sum games in which agents may give other agents the option to commit to taking a particular action. As we discuss in the introduction, [2]}'s contracts—which we will call binding contracts as opposed to our concept of formal contracts—might be insufficient to induce the desired joint behavior, as agents will only commit to actions which improve their own individual welfare over the basic game, leading to Pareto-optima, which can have very suboptimal social welfare. [4]} proposes to allow agents to be able to decommit from a task and paying a side payment. Our approach can be seen as soft commitment in which agents always only incur a cost in terms of reward when taking different actions, but are not forced to take a particular action. [5]} considers in 2-player games the proposal of commitment and side payments, and reaches social cooperation. We provide a general approach that only considers reward transfer without the need to commit to actions. The idea of negotiations between rounds to arrive to a commitment to an actions, was considered in [6]}. Formal contracting does not have the dynamic structure of a negotiation and lets a proposing agent make a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Also related is a literature on the emergence and learning of social norms [7]}, [8]} and conventions [9]}, which do not require an explicit consent by agents, in contrast to formal contracts.
